Floaters, Handicaps & Stupidity...

Well, it's not exactly dodging bullets for that world renowned Pulitzer Prize winning photo essay, but at least the Pork Pie looks kinda good...

I distinctly remember the time and place when it happened ten years ago. I tried to read a list and my eyes couldn't focus. What the!?! Age had finally come calling- prolonged late night TV and intense staring and straining through a grain magnifier had finally taken their toll. I needed reading glasses. Five years later, I woke up one morning to blurred spots of fuzziness and "flashing lights" in the corner of my left eye later that evening- that kinda threw me. Found out I had developed floaters. These are not the traditional spots in front of your eyes that everyone experiences, they're small masses of cells that separate from the back of your eyeball and start floating about casting "shadows" on the front. If you squint in bright light against a light background, they appear as if small jellyfish lazily hanging about, otherwise, they're just small out of focus grey spots. Fortunately, they only obscure about 10-15% of the sight in my left eye and the situation has stabilized, but since I photograph with my left eye, it has sometimes made critical focusing difficult.

With considerable patience and practice however, I have trained myself to photograph with my right eye- something I had previously thought absolutely impossible (notice how nose in photo is seemingly enlarged and bent towards left). It took some time to get my overall sense of balance and composition using my other eye, but now I actually forget which one I used.

And speaking of vision- I just got my first pair of prescription polarized sunglasses, and...Wow! Feel like I have the eyes of an eighteen year old (outside anyway)- it's like switching from 35mm to large format, everything's as if cut with a razor in 3D!

(Photos: Lisa Wood)

Happiness is a Song (& a Pork Pie Hat)

I remember when Mick was asked how long he'd keep his little song and dance routine going, to which he replied, "Well, I'd look pretty daft doing this when I'm forty."

OK... so I've been thinking about this age thing lately. I'm neither young, nor emerging- more like middle aged and festering. And this year I finally got around to shaving off the uppermost region of my anatomy. I really thought I had this unwritten agreement with The Guy Upstairs. He didn't do all that great with the body, so I'd at least get to keep the hair- but even that small measure of dignity has been stripped away.

Once I'd fantasize about winning the MacArthur Grant, now I fantasize about some asshole discovering my negatives many moons after I mix my last ratio of D-76 1:1, and making his next month's rent off my entire lifetime's work... Of course, there's an infinitely better chance that my portable, fireproof, Kodak negative safe will get swallowed up in a giant crevice when the inevitable Big One hits SF.

Actually, the totality of all these miserable thoughts came about upon first hearing this song. And I really do love this little ditty, which I've been meaning to post for a good month now (and was probably known to everyone but me). It's just that my life was once filled with so many tunes I couldn't bare to live without each and every day (as my head was once filled with hair). A curiously joyful addiction which I somehow mourn more than miss. I'm just happy I still got an ear, and a pork pie hat (that I've been lusting for since my Ska days in the late '70s) to wear over both of 'em.

(If only Mick would've stuck with his game plan.)
photo: Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection